2000: The Year the Startup Super Bowl Ads Failed (thehustle.co) 31
20 years ago, 11 different startups spent millions of dollars to run 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, reports the Hustle. Within one year 8 of the 11 companies "had either gone bankrupt or been sold in fire sales."
The how-to platform Computer.com spent $3m of its $5.8m in seed funding on an ad featuring its 2 founders holding a poster board sign. The site hadn't even launched yet. Not all the ads were quite as homespun. Another startup, Pets.com, spared no expense...to produce its 30-second ad for pet products that featured... a homemade sock puppet...
The 11 startups that bought ads for 2000's Big Game were hoping to replicate the success of 2 tech companies that came before them. HotJobs.com and Monster.com paid for ads in the 1999 Super Bowl, and both reported surges in web traffic during the game... [But in 2000] many advertisers' websites proved poorly equipped to handle the increased traffic... One startup's site slowed from 8 to 53 seconds; another's altogether crashed. "Everything was held together with glue and rubber bands," Hanlon, of LifeMinders, said...
Pets.com, whose $17m in marketing resulted in just $8.8m in revenue, declared bankruptcy less than 10 months after the game. Several months later, Pets.com sold off the branding rights to its celebrity sock puppet for $125k. LifeMinders.com, which had once been valued at $2.3B, had to sell for $68.1m in cash and stock. Computers.com also sold for an undisclosed amount...
[I]n this year's game, there aren't expected to be any startups advertising... According to the professors, modern startups are right not to focus on Super Bowl ads these days: For all but a few, it wouldn't be worth it.... The marketing professors looked back at Super Bowl XXXIV's defunct startups and saw something else: A lot of startups that fell victim to their own egos.
Although when it was all over, the Pets.com sock puppet ended up being interviewed on CNNfn.
The how-to platform Computer.com spent $3m of its $5.8m in seed funding on an ad featuring its 2 founders holding a poster board sign. The site hadn't even launched yet. Not all the ads were quite as homespun. Another startup, Pets.com, spared no expense...to produce its 30-second ad for pet products that featured... a homemade sock puppet...
The 11 startups that bought ads for 2000's Big Game were hoping to replicate the success of 2 tech companies that came before them. HotJobs.com and Monster.com paid for ads in the 1999 Super Bowl, and both reported surges in web traffic during the game... [But in 2000] many advertisers' websites proved poorly equipped to handle the increased traffic... One startup's site slowed from 8 to 53 seconds; another's altogether crashed. "Everything was held together with glue and rubber bands," Hanlon, of LifeMinders, said...
Pets.com, whose $17m in marketing resulted in just $8.8m in revenue, declared bankruptcy less than 10 months after the game. Several months later, Pets.com sold off the branding rights to its celebrity sock puppet for $125k. LifeMinders.com, which had once been valued at $2.3B, had to sell for $68.1m in cash and stock. Computers.com also sold for an undisclosed amount...
[I]n this year's game, there aren't expected to be any startups advertising... According to the professors, modern startups are right not to focus on Super Bowl ads these days: For all but a few, it wouldn't be worth it.... The marketing professors looked back at Super Bowl XXXIV's defunct startups and saw something else: A lot of startups that fell victim to their own egos.
Although when it was all over, the Pets.com sock puppet ended up being interviewed on CNNfn.
I liked the pets.com ad (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, spending over 50% of your seed money on a single 30 second ad is so far beyond stupid it should be considered fraud (yeah, I know that wasn't pets.com).
Otherwise known as the dot-com bubble (Score:5, Informative)
And otherwise, there is no connection between irrational investing and Super Bowl ads.
Dot-com Bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Why? Just why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? Just why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Super Bowl? Is that still a thing?
My TiVo just reminded me that has a feature called GameSkip [slashdot.org] (as opposed to its normal commercial skip). Record the Super Bowl and pressing the Skip Button will skip over the game to the next commercial and half-time event. I won't be watching either way, but thought it was funny and, perhaps, telling.
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Then again, I've seen a few funny ads that people talked about and even shared on Youtube. Like these [youtube.com] ones [youtube.com] from an insurance company.
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GameSkip, huh. I've heard that Superbowl commercials are a "thing", and that companies will splurge on extra expensive one-off ads to be shown during the breaks, but... that is just ridiculous..
Why? It's the one time of the year when ads on TV cost real money, so companies produce some great ads.
Like that amazing 2018 tide ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIW3l-ENHdA).
I will certainly watch the ads and (maybe) the halftime show from tomorrow and I don't care about the game
or even know who's playling.
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There's also YouTube. Probably easier. And cheaper.
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For me, I just go to http://adland.tv/ [adland.tv] and watch many days early. Example: http://adland.tv/superbowlads/... [adland.tv]
Thanks Internet!
Re:Why? Just why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Super Bowl? Is that still a thing?
Just barely. Only 98 million people watched the game on TV last year, plus another 7.7 million devices getting it via live streaming. Probably a few more will tune in this year because there's a fair chance for an exciting (to fans, anyway) game. And of course, sports media are hyping the hell out of it; I'm guessing from your snark that you'd be unaware of, or at least feign being oblivious to, all that. At any rate, football is a uniquely North American thing. Worldwide, soccer is far more popular.
Re: Why? Just why? (Score:3)
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Barely = 33 share? Outstanding.
My mistake! (Score:3)
*42* rating and *67* share!! That's not "barely a thing", that is a nation shut down for 4 hours for a sporting event.
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Slashdoted (Score:2)
man I miss those days or late 90 and early 2000s. Use to get so excited seeing new website designs even stuff on Macromedia site of the day. Now most site have the same design with different graphics and all look the same on a phone.
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PETS.COM
I'm out of dog food and my cat's box needs new litter. I know what I'll do: I'll order Dog Chow and Fresh Step online from a sock puppet and then I'll watch the dog starve and the cat shit all over the house while I wait for it to be delivered!
Startups have smaller niches now (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Startups have smaller niches now (Score:4, Insightful)
What was more telling to me wasn't CNN's web presence in the late 1990s. It was the print media's nearly complete absence. Remember, back then the web was just print with a few low-res photos (and lots of annoying blink tags) - streaming video was still a pipe dream (literally - the pipes were not big enough). A simple transition for print media. I thought for sure the print news services like newspapers, Reuters, AP, UPI would get with the program and transition over to the web. But they seemed hostile to it at the time. Like they were hoping it was all a bad dream that would all go away if they ignored it. OTOH, CNN openly welcomed the web and put work into keeping their website updated with news as it happened, which is what led to their dominance online. It wasn't because they got aboard early. The print news services are the modern-day buggy whip manufacturers, who refused to go along with the changing times until they were forced to.
Anyhow, new market spaces are always being created. In the past century we've had automobiles, air travel, refrigeration/air conditioning, transistors, plastics, satellites (a friend joined ESPN when they were just starting out and people thought an all-sports TV network using satellites to broadcast video was nuts), computers (and software - including things not traditionally viewed as software, like books, music, movies), LEDs (in particular, laser diodes), the Internet, PDAs/smartphones, cable TV followed by wireless communications (particularly cell pones), GPS, DNA sequencing, encryption, renewable energy. If all you can see are the smaller niches left over in existing markets, then that's your own self-imposed limitation, and will be why you won't be the source of the next big revolutionary idea.
The way we fill out new market spaces is people throw a bunch of ideas at the wall, and the market determines what sticks. The dot-com bubble of the 1990s was only notable in that this happened at an accelerated rate. It actually goes on all the time (it's the reason why some 80% of small businesses fail). We just remember the dot-com failures more because of how concentrated the failures were in time. Without risk, there is no reward. Are you going to be a visionary, who risks your job and capital to finance a new idea which may become the next big thing (or fails)? Or a follower, who waits for someone else to invent the next big thing, and hope you can transition quickly enough to capture some of that new market space before only small niches remain? (Or are you going to be a buggy whip manufacturer, who bets on nothing changing, and are left with only small niches once you're forced to change.)
Last vestige of old advertisement (Score:4, Interesting)
Super Bowl ads, like most ads, are there to allow overpriced commodity products to compete, so 10% is spent on convincing people to buy over priced snacks. Another 10% is to get kids to overpriced bad alcohol when they are able Much is spent by car manufacturers
I don’t know your if these outrageously expensive ads provide any value to anyone. They are likely just tax write offs. It is of value to companies where the expense is a rounding error on their ad budget. What categorized the failed startups was that the fundamental laws of conservation no longer applied to them. While we can create value, the economy still follow rules it has far a long time.
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TV (and radio before it) advertising has has never been very effective - it's that it was the only game in town. Now, there are lots of other (probably even more ineffective) venues for advertising.
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I don't know your if these outrageously expensive ads provide any value to anyone.
Advertising as a whole is contentious on that front; lots of people believe it doesn't work, others believe it's crucial, so the discussion at play isn't about the efficacy of advertising as whole, so much as whether Super Bowl ads, specifically, offer value to those looking to advertise.
Personally, I submit that they are.
I say this, almost ignoring the 70-90 million people watching the football game. It's the one time of year that there are people explicitly watching it for the commercials. Check Youtube t
Hand-egg (Score:2)
I'm edgy so I call it "hand-egg" instead of "football".
Different interpretation (Score:3)
2000 - lots of idiot threw a lot of money at ridiculous business plans (or no plan at all) because they had a web site. Some of them bought Super Bowl ads, which didn't make their business plan any less ridiculous.
ETrade was the winner (Score:1)
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Yet you still remember the ad. It did its job. ETrade is still alive and well, so it didn't kill them. Looks like they did a lot better than most of the people involved.
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Yet you still remember the ad.
And that is indeed the whole point.
I remember the funniest ads (e.g. Tide with David Harbour) and forget all the "earnest" ones.
ads (Score:2)
why do you yanks gets so excited about superbowl ads? it's not like you don't see ads almost constantly during every waking hour.
Watching sport is almost as boring as watching paint dry, and advertising is an assault on your psyche. the fact that these particular ads have million+ dollar budgets doesn't make them any less an assault.
sportsball and ads - a supremely shitty combination.
Fun fact (Score:2)
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I think repealing Glass-Stegall was a mistake
Even Bill Clinton now admits that.
it's been all downhill... (Score:2)